Hiding / Removing App Tiles from within Office 365 App Launcher and Homepage

Question

I'm looking to modify the applications tiles that users are prevented with upon being introduced to Office 365. My end goal is to remove everything aside from One Drive and Sites. As far as I can see the application tiles are surfaced in two areas: -

1. The Office 365 HomePage upon logging in. The URL is https://portal.office.com/Home
2. The tiled app launcher that appears at the top of every page

For the avoidance of doubt, please see the screenshots below

Here is my HomePage

Here is my App Launcher

What I'm wondering is how these two different sections might be customised to meet my goals?

For the app launcher, I've seen that customisation options exist to add custom applications but it's unclear as to how I can turn this to my advantage.

For the Office 365 page, I've not seen any customisation potential at all. I'm thinking that an option might be to redirect any users accessing this page to a holding page via a Firewall and just replicate the look and feel of the page.

Any feedback or ideas appreciated.

Answer 1

You can't customise either the landing page or the app launcher directly.

You can however change what apps are displayed by making them available or not available to your users as the case might be.

For the Mail/Calendar/People apps, you can remove people's access to them by removing their Exchange Online license. Assuming you have an E1/E3/E4 style license, if you go to a user in the Office 365 portal and loko at their license, you will see it consists of a number of sub-services. Just remove Exchange Online and they will stop seeing the app shortcuts.

For the next gen portals such as Delve or Video, I think you have to disable those for your tenancy to remove the app shortcuts.

I'm not 100% sure how to remove the Office Online shortcuts. I do have a tenancy here without them, and I suspect it's because we have disabled OneDrive for the tenancy.

Answer 2

You can do this by modifying the Cascading Style Sheets - see this great link:

http://blog.sharepointexperience.com/2015/01/customizing-the-sharepoint-online-app-launcher/